The Significance of JRuby 1.1

So JRuby is coming out with its 1.1 release relatively soon (it’s just a preview at the moment). I am really excited about it for one reason, the compilier. Which means you can now create Java classes from Ruby classes.

For those of you who have never heard of JRuby before, it’s a complete implementation of the Ruby language running on top of the Java Virtual Machine.Â _ Okay, so it’s just another Ruby port. Wrong. In addition to all the regular usefulness of Ruby, you can also interact with Java classes transparently. That means you get to use the rediciolous amount of software that has been built using Java from Ruby without the pain! As if that weren’t enough of a reason to JRuby, it turns out that JRuby actually executes faster than regular Ruby.Sweet, so why is it useful_?

In my mind the real killer app for this technology is that you can now use Ruby to write cross-platform UI apps with Java’s Swing) framework and distribute the code seemlessly using Java WebStart (and all the code is Open Source). This makes writing cross platform applications laughably easy and the deployment even easier. The users just click a link in their browser. No more windows installer, no more mess.